Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. This week: what will future houses look like?
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Tucked away amongst all my other hobbies and interests is a fascination with architecture, specifically, mid-century modern. MCM, as a school of art and design, is all clean lines and acute angles. There aren't a lot of frills or decorations. Instead, the shape of the house itself is the decoration. But then again, if the label mid-century modern sounds familiar it's most likely because mid-century modern gets thrown around willy-nilly and slapped on all kinds of products. Got a chair with a clean look and only one color? MCM. How about a set of plates that are square instead of round? MCM. Need a word for your retro-square-stereo-cabinet upholstered in orange and brown? You get the idea.
Falling Water, designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, is more-or-less the epitome of mid-century modern architecture.
But, the reason I'm writing about architecture and mid-century modern today is this piece that ran on Slate recently: The Post-Pandemic Style (April 19, 2020). In the article, author Vanessa Chang traces modern architecture's need for open spaces and clean lines as a direct reaction to the pandemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chang:
Architectural modernism—that is, the dominant mode of design from the 1920s to the 1970s—is often reduced to a set of principles affirming purity of form, strict geometries, modern materials, and a rejection of ornamentation. These principles responded to the ravages of war and disease that defined the first half of the 20th century. Like tuberculosis sanatoriums, the clean, smooth surfaces of the architecture of this era offered an anesthetic to disease and trauma. Modernist architects from Adolf Loos to Alvar Aalto designed these curative environments as cleansed—physically and symbolically—from disease and pollution.
That, in itself, was fascinating to me. I had always viewed modern architecture's open plans and geometric progressions as an art movement - a continuation of the lines and shapes of art deco and minimalism; to me, mid-century modern architecture was part of an ouroboros of art and design where one influenced the other in an endless cycle of more and more minimal representation. And, while my view is not wrong (at least, not in the reading I've done), Chang's presentation of modern architecture as a reaction to disease and death offers a new, yet cogent, interpretation of history. Then, in the latter half, the article pivots to something I think about a lot: the history of the future.
The ouroboros eats itself: arguably the single most famous piece of mid-century art: Edward Hopper’s 1942 piece Nighthawks
The Slate piece link's to and references a piece in Architectural Digest that asks how the current pandemic will change the communal workplace. Both pieces assert that automated touchless interfaces will become the norm and that office-buildings will return to a more-individualized seating plan, e.g., the cube farm. Both of those predictions will no doubt come true to a greater or lesser degree. But my immediate thought turned to our screens.
Houses have been designed with a space reserved for the family television since the 1960s. Over time, that space has grown larger, first in width, then in height as t.v.s became flat and wall-mounted. Add to that the current pandemic, which has, in a matter of weeks changed both how and how much we use our screens. It's not that we weren't using them a lot before, but now, with the all-too-human need to check in with one another, so many of us working from home, and having to pass the time somehow, we are all using them more. As a result, we've seen video-conferencing and tele-working apps come to the forefront of our work and personal lives. Personally, I don't think that change will disappear once we're all allowed outside again.
Instead, I think our homes will be re-designed to make space for even more screens and ever more use. Whether they are the entire-room-as-screen, like Star Trek's holodeck or Bradbury's Nursery, or just a near-infinite supply of cheap cloth screens like in Clarke and Baxter's The Light of Other Days, the need for all of us to have access to screens big enough for twenty different people to see each other (it's hard to be on a Zoom call with the entire office from a phone), or small enough that every member of the family can have their own (this has already happened, but the screens will get more diverse and more purpose-driven, promise) the architecture of the home will change to match.
Thanks for reading.
By the way - both the stories I mentioned, Ray Bradbury's The Veldt and The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, are excellent, short reads that you may enjoy while you're stuck inside. The first is a classic story about our reliance on technology and how much of our decision making we willingly hand over to others. The second is a plot-driven meditation on history, memory, and privacy that always gives me something new every time I re-read it.
Be sure to look out for The Glossary, Issue 2 this Friday in your inbox. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click the subscribe link. It’s free.
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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel